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31 May 2016

Barnsley and Rotherham Integrated Pathology Services Selects New LIMS

The Integrated Laboratory Services for Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust announced today that they will be replacing their Laboratory Information Management system (LIMS) with CliniSys’ WinPath Enterprise system.

The WinPath system (v5) has been live and servicing the two trusts well since 2009. However, the 6 year term of the contract came to a close which unavoidably triggered the need for a tendering process to procure a replacement LIMS. Annette Davis-Green, Business and Service Manager at Barnsley and Rotherham Integrated Laboratory Services comments “We had to stick to a very ambitious procurement timetable to give ourselves and our chosen supplier every chance to be live with the new solution by our preferred deadline of December 2016”.

The tender was first published on the 3rd August 2015 and following the initial expressions of interest from 17 suppliers, 6 formal bids were submitted. The Trusts employed a comprehensive and transparent evaluation criteria to accurately evaluate all the bids which included supplier demonstrations and reference site visits. The Output Based Specification contained over 1,000 individual questions covering all aspects of LIMS functionality requirements and Trusts’ business needs. “Our ten strong team were locked in a room for a fortnight in order to fairly score all the responses and it was quickly identified that no single system could deliver on all our requirements”, Annette Davis- Green continues. “However, CliniSys and the WinPath Enterprise system came top of the scoring process by a significant margin”.

The overall objectives of the replacement LIMS project are to:

Annette Davis-Green comments “The laboratory information system is the vital component to achieve our operational requirements and to have an integrated, high quality pathology service. The new system must enable a re-engineering of pathology workload and provide an extensive user configurable reporting and analysis capability to allow the pathology department to deliver corporate and statutory information”.

WinPath Enterprise is CliniSys’ strategic LIMS offering and offers the trusts substantial benefits above the functionality of the incumbent WinPath v5 system not least of all advance support for multi-site working. The CliniSys solution will deliver the necessary platform and infrastructure to ensure that the required levels of availability, scalability, flexibility and business agility are supplied.

“CliniSys’ proven credentials in delivering a multi-site solution and their large and experienced UK based deployment team stood out in the evaluation process. All CliniSys personnel involved with the tender were well informed and fully understood our requirements which gives us confidence in the project ahead.” concludes Annette.

Fiona Pearson, CliniSys Chief Executive Officer commented ” We are delighted to be working with the Barnsley and Rotherham pathology teams and believe that this project will strengthen our longstanding partnership. We look forward to a successful project and supporting Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and The Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust to enhance and grow their service and deliver real benefits to their patients”. Implementation of the system commences this month.